


we’ll live a long life

by Ellisama



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Post-Blue Lions Route (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Sad with a Happy Ending, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:47:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24578539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellisama/pseuds/Ellisama
Summary: "You made a promise, Dimitri! A promise to your people to make the sacrifices worth it, to give meaning to the things we lost in the fires of war!"As if Dimitri could ever forget. "And yet, no matter how hard I try, it is never enough. I can never truly atone, can I?" He admits, giving voice to the heavy weight resting on his chest.--There are good days, there are bad days, and then there are days like these. A story about forgiveness, healing, and a vow renewed.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Comments: 12
Kudos: 75





	we’ll live a long life

**Author's Note:**

> _'The ghosts that we knew made us blackened and blue, but we'll live a long life.'_ \- the ghosts that we knew, by Mumford and Sons
> 
> Trigger warnings! This story deals with a bad day in Dimitri's mental health, so watch out for frank discussions about depression, suicidal ideation and the mention of self-harm. Nothing graphic, however! It's heavy, but I promise a happy, hopeful ending. 
> 
> Thank you Arithra and Samarium for the beta and suggestions! 😘

The whispers in the back of his mind quiet down when Felix all but barges into the bedroom. It’s not that late - the summer sun hasn’t even touched the horizon yet - but Dimitri feels the exhaustion in his bones. A small headache throbs behind his eyes, but he’s had worse.

He looks up at Felix. He is still wearing his formal court attire, a thin circlet resting on his brow. He looks beautiful, even with his teeth bared and nostrils flaring.

Felix throws the door shut with far more force than necessary, and the sound of it makes his headache flare up terribly. He flinches, and when Felix sees it, his righteous fury falters a little. They stare at each other for a very long second.

They’re thirty-two, have spent years learning and unlearning each other. He knows Felix, as Felix knows him. This is why he can say without a shadow of a doubt that Felix is furious - raging, boiling, _fuming_ \- like he rarely is anymore. Angry like he was at seventeen, red in the face and ready to use his fists to make people listen. 

And Dimitri? Dimitri has been expecting this for the past hour, ever since he declared his court adjourned for the rest of the day and retreated into the King’s private quarters. He doesn’t humiliate either of them with asking why he is angry, because they both know why.

He offers Felix a cup of tea - Almyran pine needle, his favorite - and waits for him to speak. Felix doesn’t. 

His ghosts flicker in view, offering their opinions, but Dimitri is tired of them too. 

"The woman that came to court today, orphaned and bereft of everything she held dear. Her demands aren’t unreasonable,” he says eventually, not looking at Felix. His own voice sounds like it is coming from a mile away. "She has the right to take my life."

Felix throws his teacup against the wall with a strangled, frustrated cry. The room lights up with the crest of Fraldarius. 

_Oh,_ Dimitri thinks and puts his own teacup down. _Perhaps I have underestimated his anger after all._

"Maybe she has a right to you, but so do I!" Felix snarls back. "We were soldiers at war, Dimitri! We killed hundreds of men. Will you kneel down in front of all of their remaining relatives and offer them your neck?" 

Dimitri calmly shakes his head. “What I did to her mother… I barely remember it. But I can tell you that it wasn't an honorable fight between two warriors, Felix. It was a slaughter."

"Fine then! I am as guilty as you are! Should I ride out tomorrow to Enbarr, and offer them my sword? Or better yet, shall I just put it through my chest myself, spare them the time and effort?" 

Dimitri is on his feet before he can even finish the words, tea forgotten. "Felix. No. Please, never speak such words. I wouldn't know what to do without you." 

"And yet here you are, you hypocrite, expecting me to live in a world without you!" Felix shouts back at him, his fists balled and his entire body trembling. 

Dimitri sighs, and steps closer to draw Felix into the circle of his arms. "Someday you might have to."

Felix stands stiffly in his loose embrace, unyielding but not entirely unwilling to be there. 

"Someday, maybe. But not today, and not tomorrow either! Not any time soon!" he grits out defiantly, his eyes ablaze. He reaches up, not to return the embrace, but to grab Dimitri’s collar and jank him down to his level. "You made a promise, Dimitri! A promise to your people to make the sacrifices worth it, to give meaning to the things we lost in the fires of war!"

As if Dimitri could ever forget. "And yet, no matter how hard I try, it is never enough. I can never truly atone, can I?" He admits, giving voice to the heavy weight resting on his chest.

Some of the fire in Felix’s eyes calms down, and he opens his mouth to speak, but Dimitri silences him with a gentle finger against chapped lips. Lips he knows so well.

"No Felix, don't deny it, please,” he says, every word an effort. The pain behind his remaining eye is distracting. “That girl, the look in her eyes… I would recognize it anywhere. I've seen it many times in the mirror. She is not angry, not truly. She is mourning, drowning in her loss. I know the feeling all too well."

In the past, Felix would have screamed, maybe even bitten his finger for the audacity of shushing him. Dimitri would almost prefer it over the fragility with which Felix instead takes his hand from his lips and holds it like a lifeline, his voice patient and controlled. "I….understand that you sympathize with her. As much as I loathe this… Self-flagellating nature of yours most days, I will admit that it is part of what makes you a good king. A good man." 

A shrill, bitter laugh escapes Dimitri. "I am many things, but a good man is not one of them."

Felix squeezes his hand tightly, like a warning. "Get your remaining eye checked, because it seems you're going blind!" Felix yells, his voice echoing through the chamber. The moment the words are out of his mouth, Felix shuts him eyes forcefully, and with a strained, careful voice continues: "What I mean to say is… You care. Care deeply and completely for everyone around you. You feel their suffering as if it is your own, perhaps because you are so intimately acquainted with pain. And as a man, that is an admirable quality."

"But-" Dimitri tries, but Felix’s angry mouth against his own steals his words. It’s not a beautiful kiss, not one from which he can take pleasure. But the warmth of a mouth against his own, skin so well-known and well-loved, trying to say things that even after all these years they still both struggle with. It doesn’t make the voices quieter, but it does make him feel a little bit less detached, a little bit more in the here and now.

"I wasn't finished speaking!" Felix exclaims when they pull apart, his brow set in an angry furrow. In the decade of peace, Felix has made many strides towards controlling his temper. But when he feels as deeply as he does, Dimitri knows the fire inside him is hard to contain. "As a man, it is admirable to offer your life in penance for what you've done. But as a king, you owe your people more. Nobody is helped by your death. If anything, you're doing your people a disservice, and for what? To satisfy your own sense of guilt? How very egoistical of you."

That strikes a wrong chord within him. "Felix, this has nothing to do with my desires! This is for the girl whose mother I killed in front of her eyes while pursuing Imperial soldiers! For all those who have died because of me!" He bellows, his voice booming, dangerous, in a way he hates it to be. “Why can’t you understand that?”

Felix snarls back at him, unafraid. "And her killing you will bring her mother back? Will it bring back my brother, my father? Your own parents? Perhaps even Edelgard, while we're at it?"

An insult, a threat, something horrible to say is at the tip of his tongue. Dimitri forgets the words immediately when he sees the tears in the corner of Felix's angry, angry eyes.

Is he really angry? Or is it just fear, masked by an emotion that doesn’t leave him as vulnerable? His anger evaporates like a drop of rain in a desolate desert, and Dimitri feels just as empty, just as numb. 

"You're upset,” he states. Not a question, a fact, written in the tears Felix will never shed.

"Of course I am upset!" Felix snarls back, his voice like steel but his hands shaking. "You didn't just make a promise to your people, you also made a promise to me! _I promise from this day forward, you shall not walk alone. Your path will be mine, and never will I stray from your side._ Or have you already forgotten?" 

Dimitri takes Felix’s trembling fist into his own hand and softly uncurls each finger. "Felix, no, I could never. That day was the happiest day of my life."

"You don't know that. There might be far happier days ahead in the future. How will you know if you keep offering your head on every executioner’s block you can find?" 

"I….” Dimitri hesitates, and presses a kiss to Felix’s hand, against the silver ring that joins them as one. He promised many things on their wedding day, to love and to cherish, but also to be truthful, even if it hurts. "Some days, I find myself unworthy of that happiness. Of a long life, a wonderful future… because so many were deprived of that by my own two hands."

Felix sighs deeply and interlaces their fingers tenderly. "Then use those hands to make up for it."

"I… don’t know _how_. I don't know if I can. I've tried so hard, Felix. I'm not even forty yet, but I feel like I have lived through four hundred cold, long winters. And I'm tired. So _tired_."

"Then rest," he says, and Dimitri wishes it was that easy.

“It’s not… that kind of tired.” How does one explain the exhaustion of the soul, beyond skin and bones? The fatigue that cannot be cured by sleep or rest. sometimes it seemed it could not be cured by anything at all. 

Felix hesitates. Presses a kiss against his good eye, and then, after gently taking off his eyepatch, the scars that make up for his bad one too. For a second, the dull ache underneath feels a little bit less unbearable, and Dimitri remembers - knows - that this moment too shall pass.

"I know,” Felix says, his fingers trembling still, but not letting go. “But don't give up. Don't you dare ever give up."

"I'm not that strong,” Dimitri confesses.

"You're the strongest person I know,” Felix says stubbornly, and presses another kiss against his scars. "And the one I love the most. I would not have agreed to marry you if I didn't believe you weren't worthy of happiness, of a good life."

Dimitri’s heart beats heavily in his hollow chest. "I just…. want to be forgiven."

Felix sighs and pulls him close, his arms around him like a shelter. "I can't do that for the sake of that girl. Not even you, the King, can demand it. Forgiveness is hers to give, not yours to receive. You can only promise to live, and work hard every day to make the world a better place, one where soldiers don't have to go out to war and return in wooden boxes." 

"I…" Dimitri swallows hard and looks everywhere except at his husband. A few damp spots appear on the carpet, first one, then another. Dimitri quickly wipes the rest of his tears off his face before they fall. "My apologies Felix. I know you dislike it when I wallow in my sins.” 

"Don't put words in my mouth." Felix scolds, but there is no real heat to it. "I am here, am I not?"

"And I am grateful, so grateful," Dimitri says hoarsely and forces himself to look at Felix, still wrapped around him, shielding him from the rest of the world. Too bad all of Dimitri’s demons are inside of him. "I apologize again, for making you upset. That was the least of my intentions. Deep down, it is not just her forgiveness I wish. It is yours as well."

Felix pulls apart slightly and looks at him solemnly. "You're forgiven then, for everything."

Dimitri blinks numbly, another tear escaping despite his best efforts. "Everything? You do not know the depths of my atrocities."

"I think I have an idea. But I said yes, didn't I?" He smiles a suffering smile, and gently touches the small silver circlet the Archbishop had crowned him with as Dimitri’s consort on the day of their wedding. He’d hated it, he said then, but never stopped wearing it in all of their years of marriage. "It is not as if I am without sins, especially against you." 

"Felix-" Dimitri says, but Felix silences him with a kiss. 

"Let me get this into your thick head: I have forgiven you and everything you've done. I haven't forgotten, but I have forgiven you. And I always will."

The weight of his gaze is too much to bear. "You shouldn't," Dimitri croaks out, his voice heavy with tears, not all of them unhappy.

"That is something you don't understand! I alone decide if I forgive you! It is not yours to take but mine to give, and it was my choice to give it to you!" Felix exclaims his words all fire but his hands warm and comforting, never letting go. 

What to say to that? _I love you? I’m not worthy of your devotion, but I am happy to have it all the same? Some day you will wake up regretting you married me, and every night I live in fear it will be tomorrow?_

"But there is one thing I will not forgive,” Felix continues, his voice trembling. “You have committed many acts of violence in your life, but I will not accept nor forgive the violence you act upon yourself."

"Violence, upon myself…?” Dimitri echoes, not understanding until Felix carefully kisses a scar on the inside of his wrist. “Felix, you didn't think I would-" _kill myself._

One look at his beloved tells him that this is exactly what he fears, why his hands are trembling, grasping him as if he is slipping through his fingers. 

_He’s terrified_ , Dimitri realizes with deafening clarity. _Not of me, but for me._

Felix’s voice is uncharacteristically small. "Were you not about to offer your life to that girl?" 

Dimitri pulls Felix close again and rapidly plants one kiss after another against his brow. "That is not the same." 

"Isn't it?" Felix asks, his voice high and fragile. "Because to me, it doesn't matter who is holding the blade, because you're the one that is making the cuts."

 _It’s not like that, I don’t_ _want_ _to die,_ Dimitri wants to say, but doesn’t. Actions, not words. 

So instead he presses their foreheads against each other and looks him deep in the eye. "Felix,” he says as softly as he can. “I love you. Know that I do."

Felix nods. "But you don't love _yourself_."

Like this, with nothing but a breath of air between them, there is no hiding from the truth. Dimitri nods. "I find it hard to find a reason to, some days. Even now,” he confesses, and he hates the way Felix slumps and averts his eyes when he does, as if it is his fault Dimitri still feels like this sometimes. 

"I promised to be truthful to you, always. Felix, my love, look at me. I cannot promise that the thought of dying never passes my mind. That I am not tempted some nights to..." Dimitri takes a deep breath. "But those are just… thoughts. Little impulses, echoes from a darker time in my life. That darkness is not something I can ever truly escape, but know that I am trying,” he promises ardently. “I want to live. I want to spend a long life with you, and our friends. I want to build a future for everyone, and I want to be alive to reap the fruits too."

"Then _live_ ,” Felix pleads desperately, his voice heavy with all the tears he won’t shed.

And Dimitri wants to, but he promised Felix to tell the truth, always. "It isn't always that easy. Not to me, at least. But I won't do something you can't forgive, Felix. I can promise you that at least."

When the words leave him, he feels a little lighter, a little better. He’ll never be the child he once was, but there is still plenty of happiness ahead of him, almost within reach. 

"Swear it to me," Felix demands, his voice still trembling.

Dimitri doesn’t know what he will say tomorrow to the girl whose mother he killed, doesn’t know what he will offer her. Nothing he can give will bring back her mother, as Felix so aptly put. _But,_ Dimitri thinks, as he slowly let’s go of Felix’s hand. He is here now, and there is life after loss. He can’t revive the dead or undo his mistakes, but he is King, and there are many other things he can do that are within his power. 

He shelves the thought for later, and instead sinks solemnly to one knee. One mistake at a time, and tonight he had to make amends for bringing his husband to tears. 

Dimitri gently takes Felix's hand, runs his fingers over the silver ring he had placed there many years ago.

“With this ring,” he begins to recite the vow he made four years ago, dressed in white and blue in front of a crowd of everyone they loved who still lived. In the back of his mind, the same bells ring as on the day of his wedding day, chiming out the voices of the dead. “I give you my heart. I promise you from this day forward you shall not walk alone. Your path will be mine, and never will I stray from your side. May my heart be your shelter, and my arms be your home. Forever I will be truthful to you, I promise you.” 

“ _Dimitri…_ ” Felix warns, an embarrassed blush on his cheeks. But there’s a smile there too, and Dimitri considers that a victory. He kisses Felix’s hand tenderly. It’s no longer shaking.

“I, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd, King of all of Fódlan and husband to Felix Hugo Fraldarius, swear to love and to cherish, to have and hold. For better and for worse, in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer. Forsaking all others, til’ death do us part. Never will I break my vow.”

“You’re mine,” Felix whispers, a little broken. His eyes tell stories of carefree beginnings and soft endings, every page in between an adventure. Dimitri desperately wants to read it all. 

“Forever,” Dimitri promises. He intertwines their fingers slowly and watches the dying light of the summer sun kiss Felix’s skin. Slowly, bit by bit, life starts making sense again 

A tear finally travels down Felix’s rosy cheek. The ghosts that they knew flicker from view, and for a brave second Dimitri truly beliefs that they will live a long life together.

**Author's Note:**

> Paired ending? What paired ending? Canon is a suggestion which I choose to ignore at my leasure. 
> 
> This story is very much me projecting on Dimitri, and is at least 50% based on a conversation I had with my partner earlier this week. Recovery isn't a straight line, and by writing this I was able to break through a darker day of my own.
> 
> In the end, it's about being a little less broken together. It's about finding the light in the dark, and clinging to it together. I'm a broken record, I'm aware. Current events in the world are not great for my mental health, but on days like these we need to remember that the future is as bright as we make it, and we have still so much left to love. I hope whoever you are, wherever you are, this made you smile, if only for a while.


End file.
